


burn up with the water

by speculate



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Angels, Healing Powers, Hurt/Comfort, Isolation, Loneliness, Nightmares, Post Season 2, Post-Concussion Syndrome, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Self-Destruction, Self-Harm, Steve Whump, angel numbers, regenerative powers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-28
Updated: 2019-04-01
Packaged: 2019-12-25 14:09:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18262904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speculate/pseuds/speculate
Summary: After something has gone terribly wrong, there’s a dreamy period where you just continue. Sometimes there’s a blissful amount of time before anything bad happens. Steve is pretty sure he can classify his angelic encounter in the woods as something that has gone terribly wrong.





	1. all the rooms of the castle

**Author's Note:**

> i haven't written fanfiction for years and for some reason i've decided that the ideal time to get back into it is when i have a shitload of work to do for college that will literally affect my life for years to come hahaha. anyway, i'm obsessed with fic about steve recovering (or not!!!) after they close the gate, but i know it's been done a million times before, so this time i made him an angel.

Between Steve and normalcy there’s an impenetrable wall covered in squirming vines and blood and viscera. He’d say it’s impossible to get past, but he hasn't really tried. The truth is, since he got the shit kicked out of him and the kids dragged him down a glowing hole in the ground and El closed the gate to kill the Mind Flayer and his demodogs, he’s sort of given up on the idea that he’d ever get to the other side of the normalcy wall. For the last week or so, as his bruises healed into mottled yellow and green pools on his face, and his ribs started to heal but his daily brain-trauma headaches raged on, he’s been sitting pretty on the upside-down side of the normalcy wall. On the other side, through a little crack in the brick, he can see himself, healed and happy, clean and well-dressed, talking to Nancy, who’s smiling and loves him. On the other side of the wall is his sanity, and REM sleep, a balanced diet, dickish but consistent friends, distant but financially supportive parents, a school where he’s king, a terrible college essay, and a crown.

He doesn't blame them for it, but it’s impossible to deny that the kids kind of huddle to themselves immediately after the gate closed. They had just gotten Will back; Eleven had just returned from endless isolation and Mike was clinging to her. Hopper seemed constantly agitated about letting El out of the cabin, and Joyce was just as high strung about letting Will anywhere out of her sight. Nancy and Jonathan were off somewhere playing house, and everyone generally went back to their familial enclaves, while Steve was swept away with the water, momentarily forgotten about. During that week in which no one remembered to check up on him, he spent a night in the hospital where he learned that he had two fractured ribs, a fairly severe concussion that had to be checked up on later to ensure he didn't have lasting brain trauma, and bruises that wouldn’t fade for a long time. Not to mention to mental trauma. But he didn't need a doctor to tell him that.

Once his parents learned his wounds were non-life threatening, they seemed relieved to hear that they didn't have to cut their business trip short. The doctor discharged Steve the next day on the condition that there would be an adult present to wake him up from sleep every two hours. Steve made up a loving aunt who lived nearby, and set his shrill alarm clock to two hours past.

The alarm clock didn't even end up being necessary, because Steve couldn't sleep. For a litany of reasons. Hopper drove Steve home from the hospital, leaving him alone only because Steve fed him the same bullshit story about his Aunt Genevieve coming to dote on him. She’d be here in an hour, Steve said, and she was bringing soup.

Steve was relieved that his bedroom and the half-bathroom were on the first floor, because dragging himself up the stairs, ribs and legs aching, to get to the only shower in the house was agonizingly slow and painful. The house was cold, the lights turned off, and every creak of wind against the window made Steve jump. Discarding his bloody, dirty, upside-downy clothes into the trash, he flopped himself into the tub and turned on the shower spray as hot as it would go. His hair hung down limply into his face as he let the water beat down on his back. Wrapping his arms around his middle, feeling vulnerable and lonely and childlike, he let himself cry for the first time in years. He figured if there was any excuse to do that, almost dying at the snarling mouth of otherworldly demon dogs, and getting dumped by his girlfriend, and abandoned by his parents - well, those seemed like good reasons.

When he finally dragged himself out of the shower, cried-out and flush, he wrapped himself in his mother’s pristine bathrobe and struggled back downstairs and into bed. He set his alarm clock and laid down but sleep didn't come. When he closed his eyes, he saw the kids’ scared faces, and Nancy staring at him like she _pitied_ him, _him!_ \- King Steve! Pitiful, beaten, friendless save for a few thirteen-year-olds, _maybe_ . He thought about how those kids, and undoubtedly Nancy and Jonathan too, were being carefully tucked into bed by parents or friends or siblings who cared about whether they slept or not, while he was alone, in his parents’ stark-white too-big always-empty mansion. It wasn’t the first time he’d felt like his house was haunted, but it was definitely the worst, because now he knew that there were monsters in the world - in _Hawkins_ \- that were much realer and scarier than his abandonment and isolation.

He wonders, then, what he would even do if he had everything he longed for. If his parents were kind and present, if no one he knew was dead, if his girlfriend still loved him, if he could sleep through the night, if his childhood dog was alive. He doesn't know the answer. He worries that he’d still be fundamentally empty, but then with nothing to blame it on. Maybe that would be worse. At least now he has an excuse to wallow.

///

A few days pass, and no one checks up on him. It’s night again, and he’s puking into a bowl, leaning against his couch. The headaches and nausea have barely let up. Every time he stands, he sees stars. Then the phone rings.

Steve jumps like he’s been shot. He spits into the bowl to clear out his sticky mouth and hobbles over to the wall phone. “Hello?” he answers, sinking to the ground again.

“ _Steve? It’s me. Dustin._ ”

Dustin’s voice is scared and childlike, trembling like he’s hurt or crying. Steve is ready to spring into action, already struggling to his feet. “What’s wrong?” he asks. “Where are you?”

“ _I’m home. I’m… I’m okay. I just couldn't sleep. I had a nightmare. I’ve been having a lot of nightmares… I know the rest of the party is having them too, but it’s embarrassing to talk about, so we don’t,_ ” Dustin mumbles. Steve lets himself sit back on the floor, comforted by the fuzzy sound of Dustin’s voice.

“Don’t be embarrassed, kid,” Steve sighs, hoping his voice isn't scratchy enough to betray his sickness to Dustin. The last thing he needs is to be worrying about Steve. “I have them too. It’s okay. It’s normal.”

“ _You do? About what?_ ”

Steve is supposed to be strong. Brave for the kids. He can’t tell Dustin about the dreams where four demodogs have him by his legs and arms, pulling until he’s stretched taut like a wire, while a fifth tears his intestines out as he watches, painfully conscious, in the blue-glow light of the tunnels. “Same stuff as you, I’m sure. We’ve been through a lot,” Steve says, “and it would be even weirder if you came out of all this feeling totally fine. It’ll go away. I promise.”

“ _Promise?_ ”

“Yeah, pipsqueak. I promise.”

///

Steve is starting to think the doctors’ worry about him having lasting brain trauma was legitimate. It’s been about almost two weeks since the gate closed and he’s starting to see things. Sometimes it’s dark shapes outside his window at night, that upon further inspection look like they’re hovering off the ground. Sometimes it’s a strange glow coming from his backyard, and eerie humming, an amorphous shape just outside of his field of vision that disappears the second he tries to focus on it. Strange whispers of repeating numbers, 222 and 1234, 888. When he closes his eyes, he sees eyes looking back at him, hundreds of them, small and golden. He still vomits every day, has trouble keeping food down, and his headaches have started giving him nosebleeds.

The only saving grace is that he’s back on the kids’ radar. As much as he hates to admit it, those kids make him feel a little more sane. The world is so much easier to deal with when the most pressing problems are whether they should go to KFC or McDonald’s, and whether or not Steve is going to pay for them.

He forms a quick bond with El, who he’d never properly met before the whole Mind Flayer fiasco, even though sometimes he feels like she’s looking at him funny. He doesn't know what she sees when she looks at him, but it’s different than what she sees when she looks at everyone else and that makes Steve feel uneasy. All he wants to do is be normal, but if that’s not possible, he at least wants to appear that way.

“Are you okay?” El asks. Steve jumps a little. He hates how high-strung he’s gotten lately, but El’s voice came out of nowhere. She must have silently padded into the kitchen after him, leaving the boys and Max in the living room of the Byers’ house.

“Course,” says Steve, pouring some cereal in a bowl for Will. “I’m fine. Why, what’s up?”

El narrows her eyes. “Hm,” she says. She sounds unconvinced. “You look not fine.”

“It’s just the bruises, El,” Steve says, gesturing to his yellowish, healing face. “They’ll go away.”

“I don’t mean that,” she says, but before he could deflect her anymore, Will is bounding in looking for his snack, and the conversation fades away.

///

The worst thing that Steve does in order to, he convinces himself, _cope_ , is walk around the Hawkins woods at night looking for trouble. What kind of trouble he’s not sure. Angry wolves, okay. Creepy lumberjacks, he’ll take it. He’s not engaging in self-destructive behaviors. He’s just not eating because he’s nauseous all the time now. And forcing himself away from sleep, well, he’s just looking after his concussion. Stalking around the woods at night with his spiked bat digging lines in the soil behind him, well, he’s just keeping his town safe.

He hasn't found much of anything the few nights he’s done this before. It isn't very eventful, but it gets his heart pumping and his senses feeling and keeps him awake and away from the nightmares. But this time, Steve is forced to stop about halfway through his usual route because this time, he actually sees something. It’s a little far away, but it’s directly in his path, and he’s not sure how, but he knows it’s looking at him.

Steve used to be afraid of getting hurt. He used to run when a fight seemed impending but he doesn’t act that way anymore.

Twirling his bat around his wrist, he stalks towards the figure. The closer he gets, the less sure he is of what exactly it is he’s looking at. The figure is humanoid, but wrong, probably eight feet tall and skinny and cylindrical like a tree trunk. Two arm-like appendages hang at its sides. Steve realizes that it’s not on the ground. It’s hovering about a half-foot above the thin layer of snow. Steve looks up, slowly, and he thinks to himself, it’s an angel. This thing in front of me is an angel.

The thing has wings. But not pretty fluffy white ones like they make you think in Sunday school. It has six, in three pairs. Two at the feet, two at the back, and two covering what must be its face. Steve swallows gently, not breathing. He can handle snarling, drooling demodogs that want to eat him alive. This thing has intentions much less clear. It’s looking at him without eyes. It’s looking at him with its face covered. They hover together in silence, alone in the woods. Steve feels, for a moment, like he’s above the ground too.

Then he trips, and fucks everything up.

The sound of his sneakers crunching in the snow sounds off like a gunshot. Then the angel-thing shoots to attention, throwing its head back and emitting a screech that immediately has Steve’s eyes rolling back in shock. The dull glow that had been enveloping it before suddenly flashes like lightning had struck the ground where Steve is standing, and he throws his hands over his eyes to no avail. The light is piercing through his eyelids, the skin there laughably thin, his entire being laughably exposed. When he works up the strength to look again, the angel-thing is spinning, orbiting in a perfect circle, fast enough that Steve can no longer make out the individual shapes of its wings or limbs. Tears flow freely from Steve’s eyes. Maybe blood too. He distantly wonders if he’ll go blind. His knees buckle and give out. The thing is still screaming. Hundreds of year-old trees quake under the sound. The ground beneath him rumbles, bibical. Everyone in the world must feel this, he thinks.

His vision starts to black out around the edges. He feels himself allow his body to slip to the ground. Just as he accepts the fact that he’s going to pass out alone in the woods, maybe even die, the thing disappears, like someone flicked a switch on its existence. As the woods grow darker and his eyes close of their own volition, he hears a voice from inside his head. It doesn't speak English, but he knows what it’s saying: You’re cured! You’re cured! You’re cured!

///

After something has gone terribly wrong, there’s a dreamy period where you just continue. Sometimes there’s a blissful amount of time before anything bad happens.

Steve is pretty sure he can classify his angelic encounter in the woods as something that has gone terribly wrong. He’s sure a lot of people would disagree - maybe even his devout Catholic mother - but waking up in the woods with blood at the back of his throat and, he thinks - yes, it’s coming away on his fingers as he touches it - leaking out of his ears, definitely lands squarely in the “shit got fucked up” sphere of his life. It takes a lot nowadays to classify an event as having gone “terribly wrong” because compared to fighting demodogs, something like shattering the third glass this week because his hands are so shaky barely even registers anymore. This, though - the flash of light and the piercing shriek, the realization that normalcy hasn't, actually, been restored in Hawkins - that seems terribly, terribly wrong.

There’s nothing else to do, so Steve pulls himself up from the dirt and trudges back to his BMW, parked against the side of the dirt road. He blasts the heat, quaking with cold, unsure of how long he was unconscious in the snow. He is going to steady his hands on the wheel for at least five minutes, he thinks, before he tries to drive. He is going to take calming breaths, like his speech therapist told him to do when he got flustered over a word that wouldn’t come out when he was a stuttering mess in elementary school. He is going to close his eyes and wait for the green streak of light from the angel’s flash to go away.

When he sits down in the driver’s seat, it’s almost midnight. Then he blinks, and it’s 2am. This doesn't seem all that important at the time.

He drives himself home in a daze and turns on all the TVs and radios just to kill the silence and curls up on the couch fully clothed, his muddy boots getting dirt all over his mother’s favorite suede sofa, and he pulls the blanket over his head and he doesn’t sleep all night.

He doesn’t tell Hopper. He doesn’t tell Joyce. He especially doesn't tell the kids. It’s been a month since the gate closed and they’re just starting to go back to normal. He doesn't get nightly calls from Dustin anymore asking to be talked down after a nightmare. Will’s face is starting to get flush with warm, human color again. Billy isn’t bothering Max. Things are going okay for them.

And if things aren’t going okay for Steve, well, that’s his own grown-up business.

For almost a week, things go back to normal for Steve. He shows up to school just enough to avoid a truancy call going to his parents, dodges Nancy’s calls, makes cup noodles for dinner, sleeps three hours a night, picks the kids up from the arcade, sometimes sits in Mike’s basement with them and watches while they play Dungeons and Dragons. Sometimes he feels like those kids have an iron grip on his sanity and if he’s without them for too long he starts to lose it. Christmas break rolls around, and Steve is glad he doesn’t have to feel guilty about not going to school anymore. His mom calls for the first time in weeks to tell him that she and his father can’t come home for Christmas and he should go over Nancy’s, okay, kisses, see you soon! Steve leaves the phone off the hook after that.

The only thing he does differently is he doesn’t go into the woods at night. He might be a little self-destructive lately, but he’s not suicidal enough to seek out another encounter with that glowing, spinning, shrieking _thing_. Not yet.

Then he cuts himself shaving.

“Shee-it,” Steve mutters at the sting, ripping a piece of toilet paper off the roll. He holds it to his cheek and waits for the blood to soak through. But it doesn’t.

He peels the scrap of toilet paper off his face and looks down at it. It’s clean. He jerkily meets his own eyes in the mirror and is shocked at how scared he looks. Lately Steve hasn’t been recognizing himself in the mirror. The gaunt, limp-haired person looking back at him looks nothing like King Steve. And he definitely doesn’t recognize this version of himself, shaving cream still half-smeared on his chin, who decidedly does not have a cut on his cheek just in the place where Steve was sure he nicked.

He runs his fingers over the spot. It stung a little, but where there was blood a second ago there was now only damp, clean skin. The easiest answer is that he imagined the cut. Maybe he’s hallucinating - it wouldn’t be an especially surprising turn of events, the way things are going. But Steve’s pretty sure he isn’t.

Before he can really think about what he’s doing, he hovers the end of his straight razor over the palm of his left hand and drags. He watches and winces at blood blooms like red hyacinth where he’s cut - it hurts like normal, and he bleeds red like normal - but then his face mutates in horror as he watches the cut seal shut like it’s alive in a straight line from the beginning of the slit to the end where he’s just removing the razor’s edge from his skin. The little bit of blood that had the chance to leak out sits heavy on his palm. He squeezes his fist closed and it drips on the floor and he shakes.

For the rest of the night, the realization that his period of reprieve is over sits heavy. How naive, how _lazy_ he was to think that he could be near-blinded and deafened by a horrifying white angelic _thing_ in the nonsensical woods of Hawkins and walk away still normal. He boils water on the stove even though he’s not hungry and grabs the last packet of cup noodles off the near-empty kitchen shelf. He’ll have to go grocery shopping soon, he knows, but since the snow started falling and the kids starting spending more time with their families for Christmas, he’s gotten a little agoraphobic and dreads the idea of leaving the house, as haunted as it feels sometimes. He hovers over the pot and watches it boil, hoping he’d somehow burn up with the water.

The thought, ugly and intrusive, comes to him when he’s taking the pot off the stove and setting it aside to strain. The red-white glow of the electric stovetop gives him pause while he hovers his hand over the knob to turn it off. The thought doesn't necessarily come in words, but feeling - the stove clock reads 2:22, and he presses the pad of his index finger against the burning surface.

It sizzles. The smell of burning flesh takes over his senses and he hisses in pain, yanking his finger away from the heat. He watches in sick fascination as the burnt, yellowing skin of his fingertip disappears in favor of clean, new, pale-reddish skin growing quickly over it. He runs his thumb over the new skin. It feels sensitive, vulnerable. Newly healed. Like a freshly-picked scab, minus the scab.

He grits his teeth. He’s angry but doesn’t know why. In a flash of white-hot irritation, he presses his entire hand against the stovetop, really putting his back into it. He screams this time, yanking his hand off the stove and cradling it to his chest, collapsing as involuntary tears stream down his face. He kicks his feet against the floor until his back is pressed against the kitchen island, which he lays his head back against, still blubbering pathetically. By the time he can open his puffy eyes again and look down, his hand is completely healed, pinkish and stinging.

He stumbles to his feet. His flesh is still sizzling on the stovetop. He turns the stove off. Gags as he uses a dish towel that he promptly disposes of to wipe away his blackened skin. He dumps the noodles down the drain, appetite lost. Burn up with the water, he thinks.


	2. bone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’s been agonizing over these… powers all week, but maybe he’s been going about this the wrong way. Maybe this isn’t a bad thing, he ventures. Maybe the nausea is worth it.

Steve isn't sure what to do with the information that he can, apparently, no longer be hurt. So he doesn't do much of anything with it. The thing about the change is that it’s almost the sort of thing he can ignore. Days pass, and Steve doesn't get hurt, so he can almost avoid thinking about it. Almost. He probably would have avoided thinking about it forever if Dustin hadn’t fallen off his bike. 

“Mother of shit!” Dustin yells, rolling onto his back and clutching his right shin in both hands. “Steve? El? A little help?”

“Christ, how did you manage that?” Steve sighs when he sees the damage. He kneels by Dustin’s side, noting Dustin’s scrunched-up face, near tears. His knee is scraped badly, blood rolling freely down his leg onto his fingers. Steve swallows hard - he thinks he sees bone. 

“Bad scrape,” El says, kneeling by Steve’s side. Steve spares a glance over his shoulder - Mike, Lucas, Max, and Will are down the street and don’t seem to have noticed Dustin’s fall yet. Steve hopes they don’t get hit by a car in the time he’s not keeping his eyes on them. Steve reaches towards Dustin’s knee to wipe away some dirt that lodged in the cut, says, “This is going to need some antiseptic, at  _ least _ \--” and then stops dead in the middle of his sentence. 

For a moment, none of them breathe. 

The second Steve’s fingers touched Dustin’s cut, the skin on his leg had started to move. It stretches and grows, covering the exposed bone. Dustin whimpers at the uncomfortable feeling Steve knows well, of muscle and viscera healing at inhuman speed. 

“What the fuck,” Dustin whispers.

Steve yanks his hand away from Dustin’s leg, stammering out some sort of explanation, not knowing what he’s about to say. “Did you do that?” El asks, reaching for Steve’s hand, which Dustin is staring at like it just sprouted an extra finger. 

“Is this an upside-down thing?” Dustin whispers, deadly serious.

“No!” Steve snaps, keeping his voice to a hiss, trying to ignore the dull wave of nausea that rolls over him. “Maybe… I don’t know. Look, I can explain, but you just - you can’t tell anyone. Okay?”

“Secret? Why?” El says.

“You should have told the party immediately, how long has this been going on --”

“Shhh!” Steve hisses. “Look. I was in the woods the other night, about a week ago, and --” 

“ _ Why the shit were you in the woods alone at night? _ ”

“I was - it doesn't matter, okay? Point is, I saw… something. I don’t know exactly what it was, but I think it was like… an angel,” Steve finishes weakly, suddenly feeling very stupid. Demogorgons and evil government men, that stuff’s plausible, but for some reason, an angel feels way outside of the realm of possibility. But El just nods. 

“You feel different,” she says, and doesn't elaborate. 

“I saw it,” Steve whispers, swallowing, “and it like,  _ screamed _ , and there was a burst of light, and I passed out, and when I woke up, it was gone. I didn't realize anything was different until I cut myself shaving and the cut healed. That’s… that’s it,” Steve says. He doesn't mention the burn. He figures that would be way too warning-signish of him. Cutting himself shaving is one thing, but slamming his hand on the stovetop just to watch it burn is another. 

“You didn't know you could heal other people,” El says, nodding seriously. Dustin looks like he’s in shock. Steve is suddenly mortified of the idea that he’s scaring Dustin. “Pipsqueak, it’s okay. Really,” he says, clapping his hand on top of Dustin’s hat and rubbing his hair around underneath. Dustin manages a small smile. 

“Yeah, I guess it’s pretty cool. I mean, that might be as superheroic as El’s powers,” he offers. El nods enthusiastically. 

“Okay. Look. I’m going to stop avoiding this, okay?” Steve says. “But don't tell the others. Not yet.”

El frowns, her eyebrows furrowing deeply. “Friends don’t lie -”

“Not lying,” Steve corrects quickly. “Just omitting the truth. For a little while.”

“Omitting?”

“It’s like, not saying,” Dustin explains. “Just… keeping quiet.”

“For a little,” Steve stresses. “Just let me figure out how far this thing goes first.”

El nods. “We help.”

“ _ No _ ,” says Steve seriously. “The last thing you need is to get involved in this shit - I mean, stuff again. Just be kids. Please. I can handle it.”

“ _ We help _ ,” El says, making it clear there’s no room for argument. Steve sighs, and says okay. 

///

Night is falling by the time Steve manages to corral the kids home. After he drops off Dustin, who is always the last to be dropped off and always rides shotgun, because let’s face it, he’s Steve’s favorite, Steve sits alone in his car, chain smoking. He lets his fingers shake against the cigarette, tells himself the nicotine makes him jumpy, not the lack of sleep or nutrition. Definitely not the angel-thing’s scream echoing in his ears in any silent moment. He’s not lying, he’s just omitting. 

He can’t go home. He had just been coming to terms with the idea of regenerative powers - that’s a sentence he never expected he’d think - but now the idea of healing powers was just too much to handle. The thought of going home to his big, empty, haunted house chills him to his bones. For a while, he just drives around town, staring into the flourescent lights of shops as they close and avoiding all eye contact with the darkness at the edge of town. He’s out of his house, but he still feels sick and haunted and watched. Maybe it’s just me, he thinks, stomach sinking. Maybe it’s my body that’s haunted. When he reaches into his cigarette pack and finds he’s out, he forces himself to come to terms with the fact that he just mindlessly smoked five cigarettes in a row and remembers none of it, and drives to Hawkins General Hospital. 

Steve taps his fingers against the steering wheel, wondering how far he’ll be able to take this. There are definitely rules to this healing stuff, but he sure as shit doesn't know them. Can he heal from  _ anything _ , he wonders? A bullet to the brain? Burns seem to be no problem. What if he was decapitated? Would his head roll back to his body and reattach, like that freaky disembodied hand from the Addams Family? He shudders, cranking up the heat. Is he even human anymore?

And the healing shit now - does he need to touch people with his magic fingers like he did to Dustin? Does it work through his clothes? If he kicked someone barefoot, would it heal them? Does he need to touch the wound or just the person? His head spins. Questions he has no answers for; questions he doesn't want to consider. He wishes, in passing, that Dustin and El were in fact with him now. He knows they would have demanded to join if he had told them where he was going, but he’s dedicated to keeping them as far away from this new nightmare as possible. No matter how scared he is to be doing this alone. 

He gets out of the car, not feeling ready. He walks into the Emergency Room, trying his hardest to keep his head down and appear like he belongs. Hawkins General isn’t exactly bustling at this hour - or really any hour - but there’s injured people and he’s here to help. Or investigate for his own sake. Whatever - two birds, one stone. 

To his left is a woman standing by the reception desk, cradling one hand in the other, a bloody kitchen rag wrapped around it. He passes her, deliberately brushing by her shoulder, not touching her wound, mumbling a vague  _ sorry _ as he takes a seat and watches her. She still seems to be in pain, though, grimacing and snapping for a doctor to see her. Steve grits his teeth.

He stands up again, walking over to the same woman. “Pass me that pen, ma’am?” he mutters. She grunts and passes him a pen with a tacky plastic flower taped to the top. As he takes it, he brushes his fingers as gently as possible against the bloody fabric wrapped around her injured hand. She doesn't seem to notice. Steve takes the pen back to his seat and watches, pulling his hoodie over his head so nobody recognizes him. 

The woman starts to react. She frowns down at her hand, then takes a seat in the waiting area a few chairs away from Steve. She unwraps her hand and looks shocked, Steve is sure, at the lack of laceration that was there a moment ago. Steve worries at his lip. The woman opens and closes her mouth, fish-like, for a few moments, before standing and leaving the ER. 

That answers one of Steve’s questions. The next he answers by accident when a man who’s hacking up mucus into a napkin takes the vacant seat next to him. His exposed ankle touches Steve’s exposed ankle. Steve grimaces, shying away from the man’s spew. Pondering his next move, Steve remains in his chair, and dully notices a few moments later that the man’s hacking has stopped. The man doesn’t seem to notice that anything spectacular has happened, but Steve knows. He grabs a scrap piece of paper off the side table next to his chair.  _ For lacerations and localized injuries _ , he notes with the woman’s pen,  _ direct contact necessary. But sickness is everywhere, so a skin-to-skin touch to any part of the body works.  _

As he’s starting to get into the groove of his note-taking, Steve realizes he doesn't feel so hot. He’s dizzy, like he used to get when he was first recovering from his Billy-induced concussion. He stands shoves the piece of paper into his pocket, rushing to the bathroom, feeling bile rise up in his throat. 

He crashes into the first stall just in time to land his vomit in the toilet. Throwing up is never pleasant, but this time is particularly rough. By the time he can’t get anything else up, he’s feeling cold and shaky. He looks at his pale reflection in the mirror. His nose is bleeding. 

There’s something almost holy about a nosebleed when the blood runs backward down the throat. Like, the celestial irony of choking on your own life force. Steve spits some post-nasal drip blood into the sink and splashes water on his face. He thinks of the woman and her healed bloody hand, the way the man’s breathing had evened out just by sitting next to Steve. He’s been agonizing over these…  _ powers _ all week, but maybe he’s been going about this the wrong way. Maybe this isn’t a bad thing, he ventures. Maybe the nausea is worth it. 

///

The next morning, Steve is making eggs. He’s in better humor than he has been in weeks. He says hi to his mailman instead of closing the blinds when he walks by, and he leaves the front door open for some fresh air. His house even feels a little less haunted when he opens the blinds and lets the sunlight in. He whistles as he scrambles the eggs and moves the pan off the stovetop. He smiles and he can’t see it but he knows it’s ugly. He presses the pads of his right pointer and middle fingers against the stovetop and leaves them there while they burn, for as long as he can muster. He laughs, tears streaming down his cheeks, the egregious scent of burning flesh making him gag. When you start to like the pain, things start to get interesting. He lets out a shaky breath as he finally lifts his fingers off the stove and watches them heal in sick fascination, maybe even awe. One of his involuntary tears of pain drops to the stovetop and sizzles.

“ _ Steve _ .”

Steve gasps and whips around. Hopper is standing behind him, mouth slightly agape. That’s how Steve knows it’s bad, because not much can shock Hopper anymore. El is there, standing behind Hopper, peering out from behind him. Her big doe eyes are wide and she looks at Steve like she’s never seen him before. His heart sinks. 

“What are you doing?” Hopper whispers. 

Steve says nothing. He feels like he’s been caught jerking off. He’s starting to think that someone  _ up there _ wants to cut a hole in him and fuck him through it.

Hopper takes a cautious step towards Steve. “El told me about what you’ve been dealing with.”

“Don’t be mad,” El whispers in Steve’s direction. 

“I thought friends don’t lie,” Steve snaps. 

“It’s bad,” El says, “your powers. It’s… dark. I can tell.”

“It’s good,” Steve says with more confidence than he really has. “I can heal people. I - I healed people.”

“What do you mean, you healed  _ people _ ? I thought it was just Dustin,” Hopper says, looking like he has a headache coming on.

“I went to the hospital last night,” Steve says quietly. He’s keeping his voice down and his vocabulary proper, like he used to do when his parents would yell at him for his bad grades, back when they cared about what he did. “I touched people. They got better. I watched.”

“It’s bad,” El whispers, near tears. “It’s bad for you.”

“I’m fine,” Steve forces, “I’m  _ fine _ . I only had to throw up a little after, it’s not a big deal.”

“Why were you putting your fingers on the stove,” Hopper says. It doesn't really sound like a question. 

“Because I know it won’t last.”

El pulls Hopper down to her level and whispers something in his ear. “When was the last time you slept?” Hopper asks. 

“Last night.”

“When was the last time you slept more than three hours?”

Steve is quiet. 

“Okay,” Hopper sighs. “Okay, kid. You’re done dealing with this alone, let’s get that straight first. We’re gonna figure this out, good or bad, whatever. But first you’re gonna sleep.”

So Hopper and El sit at the breakfast bar with Steve as he eats the eggs he made. It’s the first time in more than six months Steve’s had a meal in his home not alone. Hopper leads him to bed. Steve is suddenly exhausted. “We will be here when you’re awake,” El whispers. 

For the first time in months, Steve falls asleep as soon as his head hits the pillow and he doesn’t dream about anything special. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Are there any relationships, romantic or friendships, that you guys would especially like to see me explore? How many of you would jump ship if Billy Hargrove was introduced as a character? Sound off in the comments!
> 
> Also, there’s no cool way to say this, but I check my email every five minutes looking for comments and kudos. So please, if you’ve got the time, doing so makes me prioritize writing this over my actual work.


	3. angel numb3rs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Most of the time, angelic guidance comes in mysterious signs and uncanny synchronistic occurrences that one must be in alignment with to understand.

Going into the woods with Hopper and El when he wakes up from his nap makes everything feel more real. There’s no real protocol for dealing with this sort of thing - the thing being divine intervention, Steve supposes - but Hopper seems to think it could be fruitful to go to the place in the woods where Steve saw the angel-thing, this time in broad daylight, and not alone, and with a gun. And Eleven.

The plan is to look for any evidence of the angel-thing’s existence, or clues to its motive, or maybe even a trail to where it went. Steve bounces his leg the whole ride over, unable to stop fidgeting. He feels rested, at least, but his head still sort of aches, and it gets worse the closer they get to the woods. Hopper parks the cruiser at the edge of the trees where Steve tells him to stop. It’s where he had parked his car when he saw the angel-thing. Steve offers El his hand as she jumps down from the backseat of the cruiser. Every time Steve touches her, he’s shocked at how real, how soft, how young and small and fragile she is, because he knows just how much raw power she contains in her petite frame. She smiles up at him and he feels minutely less terrified of the situation they’re walking into. 

About a half-mile into the woods, it starts to become clear that they’re approaching the place where the angel-thing was. Steve was a little worried that they wouldn't be able to find it, since the whole memory is a little fuzzy in his mind and he was royally fucked up when he left the woods that night. But it seems like the angel had left markers for them.

For a couple hundred feet surrounding the area where the angel had screamed and flashed in Steve’s presence, in every direction, the trees are burnt to blackness. The snow on the ground is gone - melted, presumably - and most troublingly, there are several small, dead woodland creatures littering the ground like pinecones. El nudges one with her foot, frowning. “Bad,” she says. 

They’re able to find the exact spot the angel-thing was standing, in the end. The trees were only burnt and flayed on the side that had been facing the angel when it flashed, leaving a nearly perfect circle of decaying trees around one single spot in the middle of the woods. And in the center of the circle, right where Steve remembers the angel-thing standing, there’s a two-headed deer carcass. 

“Christ,” Hopper mutters, bending down to inspect the body. El is shaking her head in a very deliberate sort of way. Steve stays where he’s standing, realizes belatedly that it’s the spot he was standing in when he first saw the angel. Hopper uses his gloved hand to prod at one of the deer’s two heads. “Looks like it was shot with an arrow,” he says.

Steve ventures a few steps closer. His head pounds in a dizzying rhythm. The two-headed deer does, in fact, have an arrow sticking out of one of its necks. Blood is congealed at the point of entry, sticky and blackish. The creature’s belly has been ripped open and dug into by what Steve hopes is just other woodland animals, but is probably something much worse. 

Steve is much more scared of this than he thought he’d be. The idea of being on the radar of something so darkly celestial, so otherworldly, makes him feel humbled and small. The demogorgons at least come from a different dimension of the world they’re in now. This angel-thing and its two-headed deer seem to be from somewhere entirely different. 

Steve slowly sinks to the ground and curls up against a tree, thinks,  _ maybe in another universe I got away from all this. _ Maybe he went to college and did normal things for so long it became possible to just  _ become _ normal again. Possible to party and kiss pretty girls and study marketing and make his parents happy, even if they didn’t express that.

“It’s alright, kid, it’s alright,” Hopper sighs, crouching in front of Steve. “I know you’re scared.”

“I don’t feel so hot, Chief,” Steve whispers, avoiding Hopper’s eyes. 

Hopper decidedly grabs Steve’s hand and hauls him to his feet. “Let’s get out of here, then.”

///

Hopper says he’ll be back later in the night to check on Steve and figure out what they should do next. But first, he says, Steve absolutely has to go to the supermarket and get some food that’s not Cup Noodles. 

That’s how Steve finds himself in the car, mustering up the courage to start the engine. He looks at the clock on the dashboard - 1:11pm. He rests his head against the steering wheel and takes three decisive breaths. He can do this. It’s just grocery shopping. He does it alone all the time. Having absent parents who constantly drop copious amounts of “food money” into his checking account - way more than he, or anyone, needs - lends to lots of trips to the grocery store. Or spending half of it on liquor and cigarettes. For a while there, Nancy would go grocery shopping with him. It was nice, domestic. She would come over his house first and take stock of his empty cabinets, make a little list, sometimes even add in ingredients for recipes she wanted to try out. He’d push her on the back of the cart, just fast enough to make her squeal up and down the aisles, and then they’d go home and cook dinner, just the two of them. And it was enough. It was plenty. 

But now he’s alone. And he still needs food. 

Steve lifts his head off the wheel and starts the engine. The dashboard clock reads 2:22pm. 

Steve blinks, breath freezing in his throat. There’s no way he just sat there for an hour. He took  _ three breaths _ \- he’d counted. He smacks at the clock. Must be broken. 

Steve drives himself to the supermarket, tries to be comforted by the mundaneness of the activity. He’s breathing a little easier by the time he gets there, until he sees the billboard. 

“ _ Got angels? _ ” the sign reads, posted on the edge of the highway next to the supermarket.  _ “Read numbers. _ ” Steve blinks. In the middle of the advertisement, next to the strange words that mean nothing to him, there’s a picture of a classical, biblical-looking cherub, holding a sprig of what might be rosemary, but Steve isn’t sure. 

He gets out of the car. If he hesitates long enough to ponder on that, he’ll explode. 

Steve grabs a cart and throws a loaf of bread inside. He’s thinking about he doesn't believe his car’s dashboard clock is really broken. He’s thinking about his body as a haunted space that he can’t escape. He can leave his house, he can leave the woods, but he can’t leave his body, which has been feeling too small for him lately, he’s spiraling, and some sort of voice in his head says  _ maybe you can burn yourself out _ \- 

“Steve! Hi!”

Steve whips around, ripped from his intrusive thoughts. It’s Joyce, smiling as she pushes her meager cart of groceries towards him. Steve tries to muster up a smile but he’s sure it looks more like a grimace. “Ms. Byers, hey.”

“Steve. You know you gotta call me Joyce. How are you?” Joyce asks, putting her hand on his shoulder. She frowns a little when she does, like she can feel how bony he’s gotten. “You eating enough? I could bring over a casserole, honey.”

“I’m fine, really,” he replies, laying on the preppy-posh Steve Harrington charm he hasn’t touched in a while. “Just picking up some extra stuff. The kids have been eating me out of house and home lately.” 

“Let me know if you need any money, doll, I know Will’s a growing boy, his appetite has been crazy lately -”

“Joyce, please,” Steve smiles. “You know I love having them over.” It’s the only true thing he’s said in the whole interaction.

“Good. Good,” she says, her smile sinking a little. “You know, I think they’ve been a little worried about you lately. I just wanted to check in. Make sure you’re talking about it. Coping.”

“Totally fine. Really,” Steve replies, hoping he isn’t laying it on too thick. “Tell Will and Jonathan hi for me.”

It’s clear the conversation is over. Joyce grimaces. “I will. You’re welcome over whenever you want, you know, honey.” 

Steve would like nothing more than a home-cooked meal and a motherly presence like Joyce asking about his day, maybe draping a blanket over his shoulders on the couch, while the staticky TV drones on and Will and Jonathan discuss musical preferences in the background. But he’ll be fucking damned if he drags his haunted presence in his black cloud of a life into the Byers’ home, which is just barely beginning to heal.

“Of course, Joyce,” he says, smiling, all teeth. “Of course.”

///

Steve drops his bags of groceries into the trunk of his car but doesn’t get inside. He’s staring at that billboard again. From outside his car, he can see that it’s posted in advertisement of a small church off the side of the highway. 

The door creaks as he opens it. He doesn't really remember the walk from the parking lot to the church’s front entrance, but he’s here now. The church reminds him of the Catholic elementary school he’d gone to, all brown wood walls and that attic-y, mothball smell. Fake flowers in vases on every surface, particularly bloody depictions of Jesus on the cross on every wall. 

Steve picks up a brochure on the way into mass. ANGEL NUMBERS: WHAT ARE THE HEAVENS TELLING YOU? it reads. 

Steve sits down in the back pew of the church, uncomfortable. He’s technically a Catholic, but his parents never made him to go church with them unless it was Christmas, Easter, or someone important’s funeral. He never minded being left out of his mother’s trips to church, because truth be told he found mass mind-numbingly boring, but now that he’s older he can’t help but feel a little hurt that he was left out of such an important part of his mother’s life. 

The priest is talking in that monotonous voice that makes Steve feel like he’s losing brain cells. He flips open the brochure. THE TRICK TO DECODING YOUR DESTINY, it reads on the inside. He skims his eyes down the page, ignoring the gaudy font and distracting biblical imagery.

_ Though we all have angels around us all of the time, our guardian angels do not always communicate with us in simple or clear ways that are easy to interpret and understand. _

_ Most of the time, angelic guidance comes in mysterious signs and uncanny synchronistic occurrences that one must be in alignment with to understand. _

_ Remember, angels are celestial beings who live in a realm that exists at a higher vibrational frequency than the physical world. _

_ Being celestial messengers of our highest truth, angels are bound by the laws of God and therefore can not interfere with the events in our lives without our direct consent. _

_ This is why our guardians have to send their guidance to us in signs and symbolic messages. _

Below that, it lists some common “angel numbers” and their meanings. Steve blinks when he realizes that the times he saw in the car, when he lost an hour, are there, under the subheading “synchronicity symbols.”

_ 111: Open. Something is waiting. _

_ 222: Welcome. Someone is waiting. _

“Besides angelic numerology, there are many obvious ways that beings from the beyond communicate with us,” the priest is saying when Steve tunes back in. “Animals acting strangely, for one. Another common instance is strange scents that feel out of place. Mechanical failures, light showers, and sometimes even advertisements! All ways for angels to tell us what we need to know!” His voice has picked up a cadence of excitement, abandoning the mundane tone it held before. What he’s talking about sounds like a whole lot of hullaballoo to Steve, but it’s clear this man believes deeply in what he’s saying. 

“Angels burn up on this plane of existence! If you see an angelic sign, follow it! If you see an angel, follow it! Do your eyes hurt when you look at it? Good! Keep going! Trust the universe! They’re always with you in the dark! Let them eat you alive, or you’ll have to face the consequences! Something rotten! Something  _ wrong _ !”

Steve slams his way out of the church, heaving huge gulps of air that don’t feel like enough. He feels like he’s been underwater for hours. The priest’s voice had gotten gradually louder and higher-pitched, and it felt like his eyes were boring right into Steve’s forehead. Like he had completely changed in personality from the scripture-reciting monotonous figure that had been standing at the pulpit when Steve entered. Steve has no idea where the evangelical preacher came from but he doesn't like him. He practically runs back to his car, slamming the door shut behind him and locking it, which he never does. He throws the pamphlet on angel numbers into the backseat, grabs his hoodie off of the passenger seat and screams into it. His ears are ringing. He shouldn't have gone in there. The priest’s words are echoing in his ears on a constant loop. He was talking about Steve. Steve’s sure of it. Something rotten, something wrong. Somethingrottensomethingwrongsomethingrottensomethingwrong. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, I heard you loud and clear, no positive-light Billy Hargrove. There might be an instance of neutral-light Billy Hargrove in the next chapter (necessary for Steve to find out the one last thing he can do with his angel powers hehe) but I haven’t totally decided if that’s how I’ll execute it yet. 
> 
> Anyway, I keep every single one of your comments in my email inbox and look at them multiple times a day. So thanks. This is a self-indulgent vent project for me so I’m overjoyed that other people are enjoying it as much as I am!


End file.
